Green card — this is what easy looks like
This is a personal story. None of this is to be taken as legal advice.
I am a career mathematician. I got my MSc in Sweden 2005, PhD in Germany 2008 and I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the US, Scotland, and Sweden since then.
As any career academic does, I have been spending a lot of time since 2008 trying to get to the holy grail of early career academics: an actual faculty appointment. Year after year, compiling and sending out large and detailed application packages; year after year of one rejection notice after another. Last year I had crossed some sort of career threshold: I got invited to on campus interviews. Austria. Michigan. And then to City University of New York: College of Staten Island.
Starting August 2016, I am part of the mathematics faculty at CUNY College of Staten Island. Professor of Data Science. I have arrived.
Visa process overview
So, having a job means I now have to start caring about actually being allowed to work in the US. Working means visa. The usual track for foreigners getting a professorship in the US runs something like this:
- The University petitions for an H1-B visa. This is the visa category for highly specialized professionals, mostly in tech (but also, if I remember correctly, photo models…).
Academia has a leg up on the tech industry here: there is a cap on the number of H1-B visas issued every year, and the big tech companies have lately taken to aggressively applying for almost everything that is released the moment it is released. This is a big issue in tech professionals immigration.
Academic institutions are exempt from the cap. - The new professor enters the US on their H1-B, and immediately starts a green card process. There are a bunch of categories of green cards that come as natural choices for an academic:
EB-2 Advanced Degree: the applicant has some post-graduate degree.
EB-2 Exceptional Ability: the applicant has “a degree of expertise significantly above that ordinarily encountered in the sciences, arts, or business”
EB-2 National Interest Waiver: similar to Exceptional Ability.
EB-1B Outstanding Professors and Researchers: Academics with at least 3 years of postdoctoral experience, and with international recognition of their outstanding academic achievements.
EB-1A Extraordinary Ability: The “Nobel Prize Winner” category. Similar to Outstanding Professors and Researchers, but higher demands.
One qualifying condition is having one a major international award. The Nobel, Pulitzer, Oscar, Abel and similar prizes would qualify you.
Alternatively you could qualify by demonstrating stronger achievements of the same types as for EB-1B — research with a clear and major impact, published, media writing about you, asked to judge the work of others…
For EB-2 visas except the National Interest Waiver, the University has to go through a certification process with the Department of Labor, demonstrating that they really, really tried to find a sufficiently qualified american and failed. This needs to start within one year of the job offer, otherwise the process grows massively in effort: you’d basically need to rerun the entire hiring process, documenting it for the DoL.
For EB-2 NIW and EB-1A, the applicant can petition on their own. For all other types, the University does this. - While working away on your professorship, the bureaucratic machine churns away. If your visa type is heavily requested, you might have to wait before the process even starts — the EB-1 green cards are pretty safe for this. Being on the H1-B visa is important here; it is one of very few non-immigrant visas that allow you to want to immigrate and work towards that goal.
After a while, you get an approval (or a denial, in which case things get more difficult), and you can start the process of converting your status. This comes with another pile of paperwork, another pile of fees, and once you have applied for this conversion, you can apply for separate permissions for things like work permission for your family members, or permission to leave the country and still be allowed to return. - Eventually this machine churns to an end as well, and your H1-B is converted to a green card, and you have permanent residency. This seems to take possibly as long as the entire tenure track process if things get delayed along the way.
When I negotiated my job offer, I got a one-year long deferral: even though I received and accepted the job late Spring 2015, I am not starting until Fall 2016 — so I have a bit over a year to get myself sorted. One of the reasons that H1-B followed by converting status is preferred is because you can get an H1-B visa sorted in the months between the job season in the spring and the start of the fall semester.
But I have a year (and-a-bit).
And dealing with immigration paperwork at the same time as I am starting a new professorship and getting myself up to speed with administration, teaching, research, grant proposal writing, apartment hunting, finding new friends in a new city and all the other things that will happen in the Fall seems … laborious.
So I started looking into the alternative route: file a petition while outside of the US, wait for approval, and go through Consular Processing: an interview at the US embassy where I live instead of the visa status conversion.
I did the sums: it would be cheaper this way. Both for me and for the University.
I checked the conditions for the various categories. I seemed to be a good fit for both EB-1A and EB-1B.
I asked the University if they would file for an EB-1B for me. I didn’t get much in the way of an answer for the first while, so I investigated my chances at an EB-1A.
Lawyer or no lawyer?
Once I had decided to go for a green card immediately, through Consular Processing, and to go for the EB-1A instead of waiting for my host university to get around to petitioning on my behalf, the question emerged: do I try this on my own, or do I retain an immigration lawyer. I discussed this at length with my wife: initially, I wanted to do it myself, she wanted us to hire a lawyer. After a while, she become convinced we could do it on our own — I became convinced that doing it on our own risked delays that could overshoot my year of available application time.
Then I found out that an old study friend of my wife’s was clerking at an immigration lawyer firm, and I checked them out. (Chen and associates, http://wegreened.com — I have had good experiences with them)
This firm had huge approval rates, and offered a money-back guarantee for the retainer if you fail the petition. I sent them my details, they offered the guarantee, and after some deliberation we retained them.
Thus started our visa journey.
July 2015; immigration lawyers retained
Retaining lawyers for your application doesn’t mean much less in the way of work: I know my career, they don’t. I worked intensely for a few weeks, generating a document on over 40 pages detailing every aspect of my academic career, listing all my accomplishments in order to give my lawyers material for their writing my petition.
By working hard and focused on this, we got a batch of recommendation letters from prominent researchers drafted, sent out, revised, redrafted, and signed by the end of July.
Once all recommendation letters were secured, they wrote an application letter, and I compiled piles and piles and piles of documentation. Every “Thank you for your peer review” email I have ever received. Every newspaper article ever written about me (I have done some research into necktie knots that has had media attention; media attention is one of the points I chose to prove I qualify for EB-1A). All my academic texts. Evidence of the existence of every major conference talk, seminar, colloquium I have ever given.
Petition for the EB-1A
I asked the lawyers about the size of my application file when they sent it in. It clocked in at almost 2 inches thickness.
End of August 2015; Petition submitted
By the end of August we had everything in place. I paid an additional fee to the lawyers to have them print and collate everything (rather than printing, collating and sending a pounds-heavy stack of paper across the Atlantic).
By this time, I had also gotten word from the CUNY in-house lawyers that the University would support my application financially at the same level they would expect to support a visa-and-then-green card process. This type of financial support was the last thing me and my wife were waiting for before committing to paying extra for a fast processing time.
The USCIS has an average processing time at somewhere between 4 and 8 months, if not more. It varies quite a bit from time to time, but never really seems to drop below 4 months. By paying $1 225, you can get a guarantee of processing in 15 days. If it delays further than these 15 days, they’ll refund the fee, but keep processing you faster than otherwise.
Paying the fee took away a fair bit of anxiety and worry. I had my petition approved on the 3rd of September 2015.
Early September 2015; Petition approved
The National Visa Center: Are you sure you are not a terrorist?
After USCIS, if you go the Consular Processing route, comes the National Visa Center — the NVC. USCIS sends your entire file to the NVC, where they work their way through to your file, then sends you a bill. You pay the bill, then you get access to a web-based form, the DS-260. This is a long form, that changes in length depending on who you are (applicant or family member), where you are from (eg Iran, Afghanistan et.c. have faaaar more questions than the Western world), your age and all sorts of other things.
We stated we were not terrorists, traffickers, drug smugglers, unable to survive without financial support, and have never broken visa conditions in the past.
We submitted police certificates from every country we’d ever inhabited longer than 6 months (except the US; the NVC gets that information directly from the FBI). This process was:
- Dead easy for Sweden
Send in this one short form, pay ~$20. - Moderately complicated for Scotland
Fill out this one web-form, and upload a whole bunch of stuff including two official letters adressed to your current adress so they know you are who you say you are. Pay ~$30. - Rather complicated for Germany
Fill out this one form. Make an appointment at the German embassy, go there and pay a fee, ~$20, to get an official stamp on the form. Transfer another fee, ~$30, to a German bank account, and write down the details of the transfer on the form. Send it to the German Department of Justice, and wait.
Once you receive their response, translate it and write out a short letter stating that the person translating the text (I did it myself) is fluent in both languages and certifies the translation to be accurate.
November 2015; Submit paperwork to the NVC
The NVC processing ends with them agreeing with the US Embassy on a time I should bring my family there for a formal interview.
J-1 visa complications
Now, I am as I said earlier, a career academic. I have traveled the world, visiting universities and doing research since 2006 or so. I went to Minneapolis for a thematic research year at a research institute 2013–2014.
To go there, I had the J-1 exchange visitor visa — if you are on this visa, and you are funded in any way by any government anywhere you get a condition added to your visa: you have to spend 2 years at home after your visit before you can get any long-term visa to the US again.
My 2 years expire sometime in the Summer of 2016. And the NVC will not schedule my embassy visit until after my condition expires. It is a tighter fit, time-wise, to have my embassy visit sometime May-July and then get to NYC in time for the start of the fall semester in August.
There is a possibility to get around this condition though! You can apply for a waiver to the homestay requirement. There are a few ways you can do this — one of them is if your home country doesn’t really care.
Sweden very seldom cares.
So I sent in an application to the Department of State for a waiver to the J-1 condition.
And an application to the Swedish Embassy to Washington DC for a Letter of No Objection.
Both of these need a Cashier’s Check from an American bank. I still have my bank account from my first postdoc at Stanford, and they sent me checks. They also need two self-stamped self-addressed envelopes to me. Getting stamps to send envelopes from the US to Sweden while not actually in the US turned out to be an adventure. Eventually I managed to buy stamps through eBay, after exhausting all options I could find to go through the USPS.
Then the Department of State starts processing my application. After a while, they send a query to the University that sponsored my J-1 visa (University of Minnesota) about where they found the money to fund my visit. There are some categories of funding sources (nurse training funded through the NIH, for instance) that are not allowed to go the No Objection route to a waiver, and they’ll want to check I don’t disqualify this way.
January 2016; J-1 waiver recommended
After chewing on my application for 3 months or so, the Department of State approved my application — that is to say issued a recommendation that I be granted the waiver.
…
But of course, that’s not the entire story. The Department of State only recommends whether I should have the waiver or not. The decision lies with the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. So as of January 13, they have received my waiver case from DoS and assigned it a file number. The case has been sent to Vermont where it now sits in line for processing.
The USCIS current processing times website tells me that they currently take 4 months for these cases. Elsewhere, I’ve figured out that before the waiver is granted, my consular interview will not be scheduled. So… May.
January 2016; J-1 waiver application to USCIS in Vermont.
Once you get around to reading those processing times properly, it turns out that the 4 months I mentioned were their target maximum time. If they are quicker, they don’t say anything else.
In fact, it is common that (simple) J-1 cases take a month or two.
Mine took almost exactly a month; on February 11 I got an email telling me my petition for a J-1 waiver had been approved. So then the last formality preventing the NVC from doing their thing and scheduling me has been dealt with.
February 2016; J-1 waiver approved
NVC Complications
Back in early November when I compiled the documents for the National Visa Centre, I made sure I consulted the official list of admissible documents for a Swedish national — travel.state.gov has a list of “reciprocity” details listing what the local version of various certificates and documents are.
It says Personbevis for the birth and marriage certificate.
We can print those out online using our national electronic ID system.
So we did.
Turns out that (not that surprising in hindsight) they want these documents to verify that my named parents and spouse are actually real people, corresponding to the information I gave in their huge questionnaire. These aren’t listed by default in the online-accessible Personbevis.
Once you show up at the tax authority office and request one, they listen to your needs (“I need my spouse’s name… and my parents’ names…”) and then immediately go “This is for the US embassy, right? So you’ll want info on everything we know about you, all your relations, everything in English and everything stamped?”
They’ve seen this before.
If you do everything right, you do this 10 minutes long visit when you compile your NVC documents. I did this 10 minutes long visit mid-January after getting (and panicking big time about) a request for more documents from the NVC.
So that’s at least a month, maybe 6 weeks delay in the entire process.
January 2016; submit documents to the NVC. Again.
NVC and the Embassy
Once both my NVC documentation were submitted, and the J-1 waiver was granted and submitted from USCIS to the NVC, the countdown to my consular interview started.
March 2016; all documents received at the NVC
According to the Stockholm embassy, this tends to take ~1 month; according to NVC most nationalities get theirs scheduled within ~2 months.
Physical exam
Once the NVC starts scheduling the consular interview, both the visa interview and our planned first entry are close enough that it makes sense to schedule our mandatory medical exam.
One of two clinics handling this for Sweden is inStockholm: Sibyllekliniken. I first got in touch with them in January, and was offered appointments the same week — so decided to hold off on booking. Once the NVC let us know they were starting the scheduling process, we got back in touch with Sibyllekliniken to schedule our exam.
For the visit to the clinic, we need:
- Proof of immunity or vaccines for: tetanus, diphtheria, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella and influenza.
Any that we can’t prove, we need to vaccinate for. - Sealed envelope with chest X-ray and TBC screening.
Turns out my mother still had my old vaccination logs from when I was a child. The logs cover everything: vaccinated against tetanus, diphtheria, polio, measles, mumps, rubella. I had varicella and pertussis as a child, so I’m immune to those as well. All is logged, so I likely won’t have to take blood work to prove immunity.
It’s not clear in advance of the visit whether my childhood tetanus/diphtheria/polio vaccine is enough, or if I need to take an adult formulation of the same combo. I expect to learn at the clinic.
TBC screening and lung X-ray was simple enough: there’s a recommended open X-ray clinic at Sofiahemmet. You walk in, you wait some 10–15 minutes, get X-rayed, wait another 5–10 minutes and walk out again.
March 2016; X-ray screening
When I arrive at Sibyllekliniken for my appointment, everyone (again) have noticeably ingrained routines: I get a form to fill out — what’s my name, my address, my NVC case number, …
As with every doctor’s visit, waiting ensues. Eye exam, some medical history, breathing, blood pressure (high, but not disastrously high) and pulse are measured. More waiting, then an interview with the physician. He asks me a bunch of questions (any hospitalization? HIV? smoking? drinking?), checks boxes on a long form, listens to my lungs, shines a light in my eyes, whacks my knees with a small mallet and pokes and prods me.
March 2016; Medical exam
After a while of this, I am instructed to get a tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis booster shot (they do it there, for ~US$50), leave a blood sample for syphilis testing, and to ask my psychiatrist to send in a letter ASAP describing my mental health condition, its history, diagnosis, prognosis, and most crucially: am I going to hurt myself or others?
This is not at all surprising, it is something I have already talked to my psychiatrist about and he is pretty much just waiting for the request to write the letter.
And then that’s pretty much it.
After the meeting I end up reflecting a bit on ‘bedside’ manners (did he really have to go on and on about my weight like that? did he really have to try over and over to ‘trick’ me into saying my bipolar disorder makes me violent?) and the layers and layers of gatekeeping involved in the immigration process.
Embassy interview
The call for an embassy interview finally arrived by email in the last few days of March. The NVC and the US Embassy in Stockholm have scheduled us to interview early May. The actual paper letter from the NVC arrived the day before our Embassy appointment.
March 2016; call for Embassy interview
The NVC letter was followed a few weeks later by an email from the US Embassy in Stockholm, detailing everything we had to prepare, and had to bring to our consular interview. Most of these things I have had prepared and packed for months already — but one item threw me.
My German police report is in German, and for the NVC application I had translated and certified the translation myself. The US Embassy, however, was very clear that self-translated documents would not be accepted.
With just over two weeks to go I sent out for a certified translation online.
April 2016; certified translation ordered
Our scheduled visit itself was scheduled for 8.30am. From reading online, the immigrant visa queue seems to often be very short, so we end up planning for a departure from home around 7.30–7.45.
We arrived at the embassy somewhere around 8.20am, and found the empty line for immigration visa. The non-immigrant visa line outside was already a good 20–30m long. After a few minutes, and two-three non-immigrant applicants before us, we get called up to the security check. Show our passports, and the letter listing my wife as part of my party, we get checked with a master list of appointees. Empty all pockets for an X-Ray, and walk through a metal detector, cellphones shut off and checked into a holding box in the security booth, and then we could walk across the embassy yard to the consular office. Checkin with the immigration visa unit, where they took our paperwork, crosschecked to see we had everything expected, and then a good 30–45m wait.
Finally, we get called up for the actual interview. The consul wanted to know why we wanted to move to the US, and what my wife would be doing for a living. The mailing address we had given was not good enough: we needed a friend with a personal home mailing address to send our cards to.
In the end, we were given a Notice of Ineligibility under paragraph 221 (g), pending our submission of a Good Enough address, which I sent in that same evening, after getting hold of a friend to state as c/o. The consul told us that once we submitted the address, we could expect 10 business days before we receive our approved and printed immigration visas.
The Stockholm embassy works very quickly: we had our interview on Wednesday, submitted a c/o address Thursday, got acknowledgment on Friday, and passports were delivered the following Monday. Visas included, as well as our piles of paperwork, inside sealed envelopes.
The big one; the envelope with my entire case history, came with one corner cut open: you can kinda sorta see the edges of a lot of paper in it. At first I started worrying a lot when seeing this, since there are so many admonishments not to open envelopes — but as my wife pointed out, this is probably for embassy inspection: make sure envelopes that enter the premises are not a threat vector.
With the envelope, we also got our Alien Registration Numbers.
My wife got the prettier number.
She thinks I’m silly for caring.
First entry
The summer ticked along, and once packing started in earnest, so did my worries around both moving house and about the first entry. Everything you read online about it drums up worries: it is one more interview, where someone has the power to randomly decide to deny you entry, throw you out of the country, and break this entire process just as you are at the threshold of its finish.
After building up my anxiety levels for more than a week ahead of the trip, actually arriving was an anti-climax.
I walk up to the border crossing hall, and after asking two-three times to make sure, I make my way into the Visitors line. Newark was calm and our flight was pretty much alone in the arrivals, so the wait was short.
Then I walk up to the counter, hand over my passport and says something lighthearted about expecting secondary, because I’m immigrating. He asks for my Sealed Documentation, and I pull up the rolling carry-on bag that contains that bundle. He takes my fingerprints and a photo, then calls over a colleague for escort. The escort takes my passport, customs form, and the bundle.
We walk through a side corridor and down to the waiting pen for secondary interviews. A glass wall separates me from the luggage arrival hall. I get shown the seats, and sit down. My paperwork is handed on to a third CBP official, and I watch as she opens up the package, leafs through it a little bit, and then pulls out a stamp and starts stamping things.
Then she calls me up. I walk up, and she hands me my passport and customs form.
Welcome to America, sir.
That was it.
No questions.
Every other border crossing I have ever had asked more questions.
I have had J-1 crossings that took more time.
June 2016; first entry, immigrant visa stamped
So that’s it. After crossing the border, I met up with friends and stayed the night in New York. The next day I walked in the NYC Pride March, and my trip continued with a mathematics workshop in Providence and apartment hunting on Staten Island with my wife.
But the green card journey is basically done here. The card will be printed and mailed out in a while: when I return again early August, the card will be waiting for me. Permanent residency: done.
Timeline
My full timeline looks like this:
- May 2015. Job offer negotiated and accepted.
- July 2015. Retained immigration lawyers. Wrote 40 pages on how awesome I am. Found recommendation letter writers. Got recommendation letters written, revised, signed and submitted to my lawyers.
- August 2015. Petition letter written, revised, revised again, and again. Supporting documentation gathered, translated, printed, collated. Petition submitted. J-1 waiver application sent. J-1 Letter of No Objection letter sent.
- September 2015. Petition approved. File transferred from USCIS to NVC. Applied for police certificates for me and my family.
- October 2015. Letter of No Objection sent from the Swedish Embassy to Department of State. Bill received from NVC.
- November 2015. Submitted questionnaires and documents to the NVC.
- December 2015. Department of State query sent to University of Minnesota. UoM response sent to Department of State.
- January 2016. Department of State recommends my J-1 waiver. NVC requests more documents. USCIS starts processing my I-612 — petition to waive my J-1 homestay requirement.
- February 2016. USCIS approves my I-612 and waives my J-1 homestay requirement.
- March 2016. NVC receives the I-612 approval and starts scheduling my consular interview. I go for X-ray, TBC screening, panel physician exam. NVC and the Embassy schedule our interview.
- April 2016. Embassy instructions arrive. German certified translation ordered. Embassy interview. Organize and file an approved address for the green cards.
- June 2016. First crossing, immigrant visa is stamped.
I have paid:
- $4800 retainer
$300 document printing fee - $580 I-140 petition fee
$1225 I-140 Premium Processing fee - $690 2x NVC Visa Processing fee
- $120 J-1 Waiver fee
$20 Letter of No Objection fee - $45 2x Swedish police certificate fee
- $70 UK police certificate fee
- $22 German embassy stamp fee
$15 German police certificate fee
$33 German police certificate translation fee - $50 X-ray fee
$385 Medical exam fee
$50 Vaccination - $230 USCIS Green Card fee
In total, among the things I remembered for this essay, I paid $8635 for green cards for me and my wife.
Things I would have wanted to know
While this journey has been comparably easy to go through, there are a few things I’d’ve liked to know earlier in the process. Things that’d’ve changed what I did to get things to run smoother.
- For the J-1 waiver, both the Swedish Embassy and the Department of State want Cashier’s Checks drawn on a US bank account. At least my credit union was quick and easy about issuing and mailing me these checks.
- For the self-addressed self-stamped envelopes needed for the J-1 waiver, US stamps are needed. These can be found on eBay, or if you know someone who’ll mail you some.
- Start early with your J-1 waiver. No, earlier than that. Even earlier. It is the one thing that has exploded far beyond my expectations in time consumption.
- NVC needs your birth certificate to tell them who your parents are.
NVC needs your marriage certificate to tell them who your spouse is.
The Swedish standard certificates that match the travel.state.gov reciprocity descriptions do not carry this information — go get them at the office instead. - You do need somebody’s home address for the green card shipping information. Without this visa printing will stall.
Final thoughts: this is what easy looks like
I have everything going for me. I have advanced degrees, and a successful research career. I have publication merits, peer review merits, people care about my research, and I’ve even made mainstream media splashes.
I come from Sweden, and not somewhere worse off — India and China have separate lines for green cards, and their lines move far slower than the line for the rest of us. Coming from Sweden also means that getting that J-1 waiver is possible in the first place — quite a few countries simply will not offer Letters of No Objection.
I have money. We have savings enough that the $9000 or so we end up paying is not a catastrophic hardship.
I have never been arrested, never been addicted, never been hospitalized for mental care. I am healthy enough and in many ways privileged enough to avoid all sorts of complications along the way.
Easy means close to a year of nervous waits and piles of paperwork. Easy means fielding expenses around $9000 out of pocket. Every other way to a green card is harder than this — well, if I didn’t have the J-1 homestay condition it’d’ve been a tiny bit easier, but not all that much.
